Firstly, I must mention that this post is inspired by a very serious issue that should demand our attention: a mining-law revamp that was slipped into the House budget bill by two Republican representatives. I urge everyone to learn more about this issue and to contact your local senators to encourage them to oppose adoption of this proposal (and to contact your local representatives to let them know you don't approve of this type of behavior).

Says Amanda Griscom Little in the above-linked story from Grist magazine:

It would allow the Interior Department to sell tens of millions of acres of public lands in the American West -- including more than 2 million acres inside or within a few miles of national parks, wildlife refuges, and wilderness areas -- to international mining companies, oil and gas prospectors, real-estate developers, and, well, anyone else who's interested ... [the proposal] would not require buyers to prove that mineral resources exist beneath the property they want to purchase, nor that they use the land for mining ... And since the land would be privately owned and no longer under federal jurisdiction, it would be immune to environmental reviews ... or public input on development plans.

Though the measure's sponsor isn't publicly commenting about it, the measure's stated goal of economic help and deficit reduction is thin at best and the cost--the potentially irreversibly destructive use of our public lands--isn't worth it.

Thinking about this issue, I've pondered the more general concept of what it means to 'use the land'. Notions of 'the land providing for us' and the Biblical references to man having dominion over the wild things are pervasive underpinnings for our American views on land use, but things like this mining measure, to my mind, put a perverse twist on such hallowed ideas.

To me, 'using the land' is a two-way relationship, where the land's natural resources give us food, shelter, and energy, and we in turn care for the health of the land both to sustain its productivity and out of simple respect for its inherent value. But more and more we see commercial development that uses land for little more than a horizontal surface which can be paved over and stacked with generic, wasteful, polluting attractions which stand apart from their surroundings in every sense (physical, visual/aesthetic, spiritual). I believe there must be a tipping point at which we have to take legal and legislative measures to enforce the boundaries of a respectful relationship with the natural world.

If you agree, please contact your congressional representatives and let them know how you feel. (For those interested in thinking more about the issue of relating to the land, I recommend reading the works of Wendell Berry, the most insightful curmudgeon I've yet seen on these issues.)

Perhaps the question, at the end of the day, can be put this way: is the world something we take from, or live in?

Labels: Environment